Say Hello to OpenLayers 3

We’ve rewritten OpenLayers from the ground up with the goal of offering a powerful, high-performance library leveraging the latest in web technologies. This talk will take you on a high-level tour of OpenLayers 3. We will present how OpenLayers 3 fits into the current suite of open-source web mapping tools and help you decide when to use OpenLayers 3 for your applications.

OpenLayers adopts a flexible architecture that enables using different rendering technologies. For example, OpenLayers 3 may use WebGL on modern desktop browsers, Canvas 2D on mobile browsers, and DOM on less capable browsers. We believe this architecture makes OpenLayers 3 a good choice for many types of applications and use-cases.

OpenLayers has always provided a broad range of functionality for accessing raster and vector data from a variety of different sources. In this talk we’ll describe the tools that we’re making available with OpenLayers 3 that let you build a compact and optimized build of the library with just the components that you need.

Big map players are also adopting WebGL as the technology for displaying maps in web pages. In this talk we will discuss what WebGL offers for maps, looking at both 2D and 3D. We, for example, expect to use WebGL to display millions of vectors, and effectively reproject vector and raster data.

Lastly, we will present the current status of the development, and the next steps.